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Article Excerpt
More than a spatial category or a topographical term, the U.S. Southwest identifies a region geographically vast, cartographically elusive, and culturally heterogeneous. Though a familiar term to the American mind, the Southwest is a place of shifting boundaries; in the early nineteenth century it referred to the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee (the Old Southwest). (1) Later, the term's inclusive area shifted westward, to refer to Missouri, Oklahoma, and central Texas. In the twentieth century, it emerged as a territory specifically located in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah or, in a much broader sense, spreading across the states from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean to include Nevada, Colorado, Oklahoma, California, and Texas as well. This inconclusive mapping reflects the Southwest as not only a physical but a figurative reality, a site for the clash of political and cultural ideologies. In fact, shaped by the cultures of many distinct peoples, the "Southwest," an ethnocentric term, evokes questions--south of what? And west of what? The contemporary Southwest is a north to Hispanic Americans as a lost homeland; a west to Anglo-Americans as a refuge free of schedules and materialistic, hierarchical lifestyles; and a spiritual and sacred center to Native Americans. They all--Anglo, Hispanic, and Native Americans-chart different relationships to the land and attribute various or even contradictory traits to the identity of the Southwest. Today, this ideologically charged region is populated by "Southwesterners" who include tourists, visitors, immigrants, retirees, miners, conservationists, cowboys, and others. The meaning, if not the geography, of the Southwest continues to evolve.
Though constantly invented, reinvented, and open to negotiation, the Southwest has a core barely remarked--it was once a site for internment camps. During World War II, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, uprooted from their homes and communities, were incarcerated in one of fifteen "assembly centers" or ten "relocation centers," situated mainly in dusty and desolate areas of the West or the Southwest. Unlike other Southwesterners, whose relationships with one another are interwoven and figured spatially, the internees, confined in isolated prison camps, could not encounter ordinary residents of the Southwest and, moreover, their relationship to the land was asymmetrical to that of residents there. Further, Southwestern American literature does not recognize the Japanese American internment narrative as a part of its discourse, and Japanese American writers barely relate their identity to the imagined or literal space of the Southwest. This lack of acknowledgment of the internment has several consequences. First, it leaves incompletely represented the multicultural richness of the American Southwest as a region. Second, the loss of local topographical knowledge about internment camps in the Southwest reduces our memory of an event very traumatic in American history but essentially missing from mainstream American consciousness. Third, the failure of Japanese Americans to recognize the Southwest orients their identity merely to temporal quality and de-spatializes their traumatic experiences. Because, as some scholars maintain, "place is our ontological origin" and "our primordial experiences are more related to place than to time" (Dainotto 1; Kort 168), Japanese Americans must reclaim the Southwest not only because internment camps once were located in it, but also because of the traumatic action performed Japanese it. Because people and places are mutually constitutive, Japanese Americans must also recognize their identity in terms of spatiality and carve that identity back into the topography of the Southwest.
Most Japanese American internment writings subordinate space to time. They foreground temporal linearity and narrative coherence at the expense of 'spatial continuity and obscure traumatic disruption. The technique is documentary but the plot predictable, and the effect misleading, because there is too much sense of narrative coherence (a beginning, a middle, and an end) and finality about "returning" and "being free." In our essay, we employ works by Yoshiko Uchida and other writers to exemplify incommensurability between such a narrative framework and the historical traumatic "Thing" they hide. Moreover, in proposing a territory-based reading by rooting texts of these writers in the Southwest, we shall de-temporalize and spatialize internment narratives. Not only should internees turn this unknown, essentially unremembered space into cosmic nature and communal environment, but they must also assume the traumatic place as a nucleus of their being. They need to recognize that what sustains Japanese Americans as an ethnic minority is not simply a shared set of values or beliefs but what Slavoj Zizck calls "a shared relation toward the [traumatic] Thing" (Tarry 201).
To these ends, a spatial reading of the Japanese American internment narrative must create new signs, literally, new road signs directing all Americans to those unremembered features of the Southwestern landscape. Those narratives need to create new visual modalities to challenge those existing landmarks through which social agendas are imposed, identities are oriented, and specific desires are elicited. At a basic level, these narratives must redirect the tourist's view. As things stand now, tourists often reduce the landscape of the Southwest to something sublime, spiritual, or therapeutic, all founded on images of sun, desert, blue skies, dramatic canyon lands and mesas, cacti and coyotes, adobe architecture, living Indians, and other symbols of a different ethnicity. But besides such bearers of ideology and culture, the landscape of Southwest should also remind tourists and others of that traumatic Thing, the internment. We may do that by reestablishing and articulating such important indicators of the internment experience as "the guard towers," "the barbed wire," and "the original toilets" within all physical, imagined, and textual spaces of the Southwest. While the Japanese American internment experience nowadays occupies a page, albeit a marginal one, in U.S. national history, the ruins of the former camps are never thematized within the landscape of the Southwest. If we insert there the appropriate signs, the visual modalities of the internment, we will facilitate an encounter between Japanese Americans and the land and people of this region. Ultimately, not only may those Americans "reside" in (instead of being confined to) the land of their defining trauma, but they may also record a more complete history of the internment camps.
From the amount of recent literature devoted to the internment, we might think this facing up to the traumatic Thing is taking place. Indeed, there is a rapidly growing body of writing about this Japanese American experience. For instance, the first anthology of Japanese American internment narratives, Only What We Could Carry (Inada), appeared in 2000.
It draws on various voices of internment; on internees' diaries, letters, stories, poems, and biographies; and on news accounts as well as formal government declarations. In addition, there have been numerous historical studies of and reference guides to the Japanese American wartime experience. These include the Encyclopedia of Japanese American History (Niiya 2001), Eric Muller's Free to Die for Their Country (2001), Wendy Ng's Japanese American Internment during World War II (2002), Greg Robinson's By Order of the President (2001), and Brian Masaru Hayashi's Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (2004). Further, in the last decade, we have seen several more personal accounts...
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